


no man bears sorrow better

by boo_cool_robot



Category: Marvel 616, X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon compliant-ish, Character Study, Gen, Haircuts, Introspective Angst, M/M, Multi, Trans Character, Trans Scott Summers, but also interpersonal slapstick, post Avengers vs X-Men: Consequences, pre-Uncanny X-Men (2013), promoting my Magneto-Cyclops friendship agenda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:22:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23882953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boo_cool_robot/pseuds/boo_cool_robot
Summary: Unlike his talent for envisioning the geometry of battle, Scott has long had a hard time picturing precisely what the undefinable thing known as his self should look like. He can only envision a vague figure in red, a defiant X raised. His self has always been something that he couldn’t help embodying, only realized when someone recognized him and punched him in the face.He vaguely wishes someone would deck him so he can feel normal againIn which Scott receives a haircut from Magneto in a bunker, navigates interpersonal slapstick, and cries.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr & Scott Summers, it's really a free-for-all in there, mostly this is gen though, multiple implied scott ships, past Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier - Relationship
Comments: 4
Kudos: 46





	no man bears sorrow better

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place after Avengers vs. X-Men: Consequences and before 2013 Uncanny X-Men. It primarily draws on Gillen’s AvX: Consequences, though it also references the main Avengers vs. X-Men event, Bendis’s Uncanny, Fraction's Utopia, Prelude to Schism, and 2004 Excalibur. You probably should have read AvX: Consequences, which is directly quoted here, to follow this fic, but the other comics are optional. This fic is more or less canon-compliant, depending on how nice you think Magneto is at this point. 
> 
> I interpret Scott as a trans guy. It’s not the focus of this fic, but it’s present, including references to dysphoria and transphobia. 
> 
> I’m assuming that Erik hasn’t shaved his head yet when this fic takes place because even if he’s not obligated to formally mourn Xavier it feels kind of weird having a big haircut soonish after his death. I am also assuming that Scott hasn’t realized yet that Erik’s powers are also broken. 
> 
> This fic discusses Xavier and Scott’s relationship, which I read as manipulative and deeply fucked up. However, Scott and Erik don’t quite realize it in this fic because of how close they are to being on the inside of that dynamic. 
> 
> Thank you to [Franzbibliothek](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzbibliothek/pseuds/Franzbibliothek) for betaing and [luckydicekirby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuckyDiceKirby/pseuds/LuckyDiceKirby) for a Judaism consultation. If anything is still wrong, it’s completely my fault. 
> 
> Title is is from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. 
> 
> Content warnings: Scott’s canonical depression, suicide ideation, trauma, and toxic relationship with Xavier. References to the above-mentioned transphobia and dysphoria. Despite this list of warnings I don’t consider this fic angsty, but YMMV.

Scott is ignoring something. It nips at the edge of his consciousness, appears in flashes in the corner of his eye as he darts through tall pines and watches his breath stream out behind him. 

It’s not an unusual state of mind. Nearly everyone he’s known would say that Scott is usually repressing something. He doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s only practical to have his memories lined up in his mind, only emerging when he’s braced for them. Frankly, being good at repression should probably be considered an essential skill for an X-Man. 

He shakes off the thoughts and lowers his glasses to send an optic blast toward a far tree, compensating for the twinge in his thigh where he’d injected that morning. He knows even before the beam leaves his eyes that he failed to line up the angle correctly, thrown off by an odd feeling on his neck. The blast fizzles anyway. 

Ah. He’s relieved that he’s caught it during his workout, not in the field. What he’s been ignoring is that he needs a haircut. 

As the team is currently holed up in an abandoned Weapon X bunker, a haircut presents a significant logistical challenge. But he’s always been a match to any logistical challenge. Line up the pieces, take the shot. Far easier than anything else they’ve been through these past few weeks. 

He kicks his boots free of snow before coming back into the base. He cannot remember the last time he had to think about getting a haircut. Even if he’d been in a state of mind to think of it, his jailors hadn’t wanted to touch the helmet that held the ruby quartz lenses. In the Utopia days, he had meekly submitted to the stylist that Kate Kildare hired while Erik had conveniently disappeared and Emma had openly laughed at the idea. In between, the burn of the Phoenix Force had erased all considerations of his physical self. It wasn’t all bad, he supposes. 

Scott’s first haircut—the first that he can remember—was a few weeks after Professor Xavier had taken him in. It had been after Scott was supposed to be in bed, the professor shut into his study on one of his mysterious late-night phone calls that Scott now knows was to Magneto. Driven by some sense of wrongness, the impulse enough to make him disregard the hour, he’d locked himself in the bathroom with a pair of kitchen scissors and hacked most of his hair off. After getting it as even as he could, which was not terribly even considering that he had to be careful of his glasses and that he couldn’t see the back of his head, he’d swept the long hanks of dead hair into the trash, stuck his head under the faucet, and then scrambled back into bed, heart pounding over the foregone conclusion of his newly short hair being discovered. He’d awoken to find that the professor had already made an appointment at some fancy hair salon to neaten up his ragged hack job. He’d sat in that flowery-scented salon chair, eyes clenched shut, with the same set-jaw determination that he would come to submit to all the professor’s decisions with. He doesn’t really remember how his hair came out. 

Years after that, Jean had cut his hair for a very long time. 

He stops the memory from playing before it can overcome him. He’s been a dab hand at this trick even before any telepath had explained it to him. Well, he thinks he’d learned it before meeting any telepaths. Put the thought in place, shut the door in his mind, walk away. Easy. He walks himself back to the task at hand. 

Scott does what he does best: Runs through the options. 

He could walk into town and find a barber, but he risks being seen. Emma without makeup and Erik in a sweatshirt look startlingly different, unrecognizable to the general public. Unfortunately, Scott’s been reliably informed that he has a tendency to look like himself. “It’s the constipated look that’s always on yer mug,” Logan had helpfully suggested, back when Logan had said things about Scott that were not accompanied by spitting.

Or he could simply wait until they’re more established and have more resources, and decide what to do about his hair then. Now that he’s noticed it, it feels unbearable to wait for his hair to grow even longer though. And he knows from long experience that at least two times out of three, waiting just leads to things getting worse. 

Or he could cut his own hair. With this option, he only risks having a bad haircut. As his former teammates would have cheerfully told anyone, he’s already had a lot of bad haircuts in his life. It’s certainly more survivable than being recognized. More definitive than waiting. Yes, he’s wasted enough time hovering in the halls of this mostly-empty bunker—minutes, days, weeks?

He goes to find scissors. 

Under the bathroom sink, Jean always kept—

To trim his sideburns, Logan had—

He cuts himself off again and grabs a pair of scissors from the kitchen, stocked just a few days ago by Erik. The sharpest, and likely only, pair in the place. 

He heads to the bathroom they’ve set up in. The rows of sinks and stalls were designed for dozens on dozens of state scientists engineering mutant bodies into weapons. 

The team’s toiletries—Emma’s bottles of mysterious French creams, Erik’s assorted homemade goop, Illyana’s suspicious lack of even toothpaste—are dwarfed by the cold military scale. 

Scott goes over to the far sink, looks his red-tinted reflection in the eye, and braces himself to begin another step in the endless tedious project of maintaining his body. 

Professor Xavier had once given them a lecture on a psychological experiment where researchers drew marks onto animals and put them in front of mirrors. If the animal saw itself in the mirror and tried to clean the mark off, that meant it was self-aware. Scott doesn’t remember what it meant if the animal gave in and accepted its new reality of being marked. Or if it just kept scratching, nothing about itself satisfactory down to the bones, no matter how much of its skin it took off. 

Scott rarely looks in mirrors.

He distantly realizes that in his hands, the scissors are shaking. He lifts the blades to his temple anyway. 

“Stop that,” someone says testily. 

At the realization that he’s being watched, Scott wheels and lifts his glasses, gritting his teeth as the concussive beam merely flares and fizzles. The scissors are held foolishly in front of him, made all the more foolish as he realizes that it’s Erik standing in the doorway. Erik slides gracefully back up from where he was ducked and stares stonily at him. 

“I see that you’re alert as ever, even if that blast left something to be desired,” he drawls, no apparent change in his facial expression. 

“Sorry,” Scott mutters reflexively. He lowers the scissors and straightens his back. Erik had barely spoken to any of them since they’d moved into the bunker, marching straight into his chosen room upon arrival and emerging days later with a bearded face and ragged clothes only to press a list of renovation supplies into Scott’s hand and announce that he’d put them all on a chore roster. He’s remained strangely distant since then, not even once bursting into Scott’s office to declare something cryptic like he used to. 

Erik shakes his head in seeming annoyance. “Never mind that. Go ahead, ask me.” At Scott’s blank look, Erik gestures at the scissors. “Ask me to cut your hair, boy.” 

As a child, Scott was often confused when people asked questions of him. They never said what they meant, but snapped anyway when he failed to grasp the implications behind their words. As an adult, he’s always running possible scenarios during conversations, playing out a dictionary of shadow meanings in an attempt to keep one step ahead. 

Erik’s sentence seems simple enough, which means that it probably isn’t. At the best of times, conversation with Erik tends to feel like running on stilts through an obstacle course while attempting to chase down someone who was also throwing knives at your head and expecting you to catch them. This is nowhere near the best of times, all hope of satisfaction in lobbing banter back and forth gone. Scott has no idea how to read this newly terse, ragged version of Erik. 

He looks at Erik in the doorway and thinks about the warm way that Erik’s hand on his shoulder had once felt as he asked Scott to call him by the name his parents gave him. 

“Will you cut my hair?” Scott asks.

Erik nods, uncrosses his arms. “Stay here,” he says, and then walks away. 

Scott takes a deep breath in the silence. He feels unbalanced, and ashamed to be unbalanced when everything, especially now, depends on him being prepared for anything. He should have thought of asking one of his team to cut his hair, but it seemed too much to imagine asking them—Erik, Illyana,  _ Emma _ —to participate in something like this. Grabbing him by the arm to pull him out of rubble, offering him a drink of water, trying to repair the harms that prison did to his body is one thing. Coming close to him for something so mundane as a haircut is unthinkable after what he—what the Phoenix—did to them. 

Scott knows that everyone from the authorities to the whole Jean Grey School believes he’s trying to evade consequences for what he did, but he’s always accepted the weight of his actions. If this is some sort of strange punishment for him that Erik’s devised, he’ll accept it. 

Erik suddenly returns with a dizzying array of hairdressing supplies in his arms. Electric razor, straight razor, scissors, towel, cup, comb, shaving cream, all balanced atop a folding chair. Household goods always seem to practically multiply around Erik—he has some kind of domestic sense of practicality that’s alien to Scott. 

“Sit,” Erik commands, unfolding the chair in front of Scott. As Scott obediently drops, he busies himself laying out the remainder of his supplies. At this height, Scott can just barely see his throat in the mirror. Erik will have to stoop to reach him. 

Scott supposes, on a moment’s thought, that Erik must cut his own hair himself. He’s never seen Erik’s hair overgrown from its neat mass of curls, save for now. Cutting it must be simple for him with his powers. Where Scott’s powers are fit only for destruction, in varying levels of precision. 

He swallows. Looks away from his reflection. 

“Shirt off,” Erik says without even glancing at him. “It’ll save a wash.” 

He tugs his uniform top off, careful not to dislodge his glasses. Erik grabs it and drapes it over a far sink. Scott reflexively crosses his arms over his chest, even as he’s aware that Erik’s already seen the scars and paid no apparent attention to them—nearly all the X-Men have seen each other shirtless in one medical emergency or another. 

“How would you like it cut?” 

Scott hugs his arms around himself further. He always feels cold. “Men’s regular. Short sides and back, a little longer on top.” 

He thinks he sees Erik roll his eyes in the mirror. Barely as Scott can register the motion, Erik’s fingers slide in his hair, testing the length. Scott shivers even though he’s braced for it, an ingrained response to someone touching his scalp. Bobby and Hank had thought it was funny to poke him when they were kids. He suspects that Erik may also find it funny—or at least he would have before the Phoenix changed the distance between them. 

He can’t recall if anyone has touched him since prison—if there had been a set of hands past the ones tossing him around. Doesn’t think of Jake, Logan, Ororo, Emma, or any of the past litany of friends and comrades who have put a hand to his skin. 

“Two centimeters off the top, blended to a number two on the sides?” Erik releases his hair. 

“Sure,” Scott agrees as if he knows what he’s talking about. The feeling that he’s gotten into something bigger than he expected is not exactly unfamiliar when it comes to Erik. 

“You’ll need to take your glasses off too,” Erik continues, merciless and seemingly unaware of it. Scott has seen his moods of blithe impropriety, a catty, cheerful hurricane. He has seen his unplacatable rage, vast enough to fill every space he’s in. This Erik, bustling with a comb in his hands, feels like he sits at neither of those poles, but is just as unstoppable. Well. He has the right to be merciless to Scott. 

Scott takes off his glasses, squashing the noise at the back of his throat. He clutches them in his palm.

Erik begins in silence, with an occasional clink of plastic on porcelain. The squeak of a faucet opening and a brief rush of water, the muted shifting of shoes on tile. By now, Scott is used to suppressing his nerves around the sounds of public bathrooms. He doesn’t even wince when the comb in his hair drips cool water on the back of his neck. 

The buzz of the clippers starts. He feels what he’s sure are neat, efficient strokes at his temple. Erik, without a word of warning, folds his ear down to run the clippers around it. One side and then the other, a neat symmetry. He idly wonders why Erik seems to be holding the clippers in his hand instead of with his powers, but doesn’t break the silence. He almost wishes that he could see the expression on Erik’s face, even if he’s awful at discerning anything from the look on someone’s face except for where their gaze says they’ll shoot next. 

Erik firmly pushes his head into a bowed position and begins shearing the back and then top of his head, teeth of the plastic comb clicking against the clippers. Scott tightens his fingers around the temples of his glasses. He has a headache, he thinks. He usually has a headache. 

He feels strands of his hair brush his bare shoulders, imagines his head being shaped like an X-Mansion hedge back into himself again, whatever that means. Unlike his talent for envisioning the geometry of battle, Scott has long had a hard time picturing precisely what the undefinable thing known as his self should look like. He can only envision a vague figure in red, a defiant X raised. His self has always been something that he couldn’t help embodying, only realized when someone recognized him and punched him in the face. 

He vaguely wishes someone would deck him so he can feel normal again. 

Scott realizes by a new scraping sensation on his neck that Erik has moved on to using a razor on his neckline, something that only Ororo, out of everyone who’d ever helped him cut his hair, had done. It moves efficiently—he’s sure the blade is sharp. Scott imagines the gleam of the razor, how it could easily slip in Erik’s hand. 

He clears his throat. “If you wanted to kill me, you should have covertly done it while I was in prison. You could have blamed the human carceral system, the Avengers. Better optics.” 

Erik snorts, tilts Scott’s head down further. “I’m no fool. I know full well how best to spin your death to serve the cause of our people.” Another scrape of the razor.

“Oh. Good.”

He supposes that this would be far too elaborate a ruse merely to kill him when Erik lives down the hall and is perfectly capable of sending knives through his heart whenever he cares to. 

Erik sighs. His breath ruffles the crown of Scott’s head. “Would you  _ like _ me to kill you, boy?” 

“Well. No.” He supposes that Erik has as much right as any X-Man does to kill him, perhaps more in whatever complicated thing was between him and the professor. But Scott had made his decision when he called for his team to break him out of prison. He couldn’t die while they were huddled here like rats in a warren, no human eyes on them. Erik had a better sense of drama than that, at the very least. 

“Glad we agree, then.” A swipe of the towel against newly bared skin. 

He is not sure what to say from here. He suspects he shouldn’t have started a conversation in the first place. 

“Would you like to punch me in the face?” Scott ventures desperately. 

“Not presently.” Erik pauses. “I was given to understand that was the sort of thing you did with Ms. Frost. Or perhaps the Wolverine.” 

Scott feels his blush instantly light down his shoulders and chest. Erik, continuing to be merciless, snickers. At least in this bewildering conversation, in this barren facility, in this empty time, Scott can come back to the familiar ground of opening his mouth and immediately wanting to disappear. 

He’d always done best when telepaths could reach into his mind and simply see the lines and shapes he stumbled putting into words—Emma, Jean, the Professor. And he had always preferred them placing their thoughts into his mind in turn, no need to constantly struggle at the hidden meanings of their tone or expression. 

Even as he’d grown up, receiving the Professor’s words in his mind had always felt like the easiest thing in the world.

As if he can sense the direction of his thoughts, Erik presses his head down again. “We’re almost done,” he rumbles. Even Scott could tell it was the kind of tone people used to soothe fussy toddlers. He wants to feel insulted even as some part of him low in his stomach finds it comforting. Scott’s not sure when the last time he felt comforted was. He shakes it off—he doesn’t need to be comforted about the same inevitable realities of the world. 

Scott is here, a blade at his neck, because he knows he needs to keep putting his body back into the correct shape, like he needs to keep walling his memories into a structure that they won’t flood out of, like he needs to get out there, visor off, frightening the powerful so that mutants don’t lose every small victory they’ve barely clawed their way to. He tries to find sureness again in the familiarity of it.  _ Hated, feared, and saving the world _ . 

And then Erik leans in and brushes his hand over the nape of Scott’s neck. Off balance, the touch activates something in one of the parts of Scott’s mind. The doors of memory crumble like ash, and Scott is helpless to what rushes into his mind all at once. 

He remembers an endless field of barley and an endless sky of stars, and him in the middle, fifteen and scrawny and perpetually hunched over. Hair freshly cut. Night air licking coolly on his bare forearms, planes passing by far overhead in his peripheral vision. He was dreaming so desperately of impossible freedom, of being able to strip off his glasses and be any other unremarkable teenage boy. He had wanted to disappear into normalcy. Stupid. 

Professor Xavier had trekked out in his heavy chair to find Scott. He’d hugged him close, put his warm hand on the back of his neck, and reminded him of his responsibilities. Of his purpose in the world. Even when Scott had asked him to leave the X-Men, even when he had been incandescently angry at him, he had known that the Professor’s lessons would be out there somewhere. Under the perpetually crumbling rooms of his memories and perpetually warping beams of his body, he could always come home to a reminder of the firm, whole foundations. 

And then after the Phoenix, he wakes up to find the whole house gone. 

Dampness falls on Scott’s fingers. He squeezes his eyes more tightly shut. Wills himself to stop. It wouldn’t be good for salt to build up on the ruby quartz lenses in his hand. 

He notices distantly that the razor at his neck has stilled. 

“I’m not here to watch you be a fool, boy.” Erik’s voice is firm, displeased. 

“I’m sorry.” Scott sniffs, straightens his spine, folds his hands in his lap, fighting against the impulse to dig his nails into his skin. Here he is, somehow having gotten worse at something as simple as receiving a haircut. Here he is, alone, powers broken, having killed the best father he ever knew. He kicks himself for the melodrama, even as he’s helpless to stop crying. “Sorry. I know that you—the Professor—.” 

Scott is acutely aware of his own shaky breaths in the silence. His skin is buzzing. Slowly, he feels a hand descend firmly on his shoulder. 

Erik sighs. “I am speaking from experience when I say this, Scott: There’s only so long one can play house with Charles Xavier and call it a nation.”

The words won’t quite process in his brain. The tears on his face, the hand on his shoulder—it’s all too much. “What?” Scott’s voice cracks horribly. He hiccups in misery, just to round it off. 

“Would you go back to the self of your past if you could?” Erik’s voice is low. His accent has come out more strongly. His hand on his shoulder doesn’t tighten, doesn’t move at all, but somehow Scott becomes more and more aware of its weight. 

Under Erik’s relentlessness, Scott gives in and peels back a few corners of repression. 

He rubs at his thigh as he builds the nerve within himself to introspect. Cracks the door to his memories and lets himself look at them as they leak out. Sends his love to the scared kid he used to be and lets himself fully sit with the weight of his present. 

He’s scared and unsure, he thinks, in a way that he hasn’t acknowledged in a long time. He’s excited, imagining mutants all over the world coming to know their true selves. He feels exactly like he did when he first cut his hair. He feels nothing like who he used to be. 

“No,” he says, wobbly. He immediately knows it’s the right answer. 

Everything has turned out differently than Professor Xavier dreamed that night in the barley field. Nonetheless, he’s here despite himself. 

“No,” he says again, firmer. “I’d choose to be here.” 

“Then don’t tell me your apologies.” Erik pauses. “Xavier found it within himself to justify a great deal. Somehow, you’ll have to find a way to live with yourself as well, dispersed as we are. I did.” He doesn’t say if the object in that sentence is Scott or himself. 

“Thanks,” Scott says. He’s missed Erik’s cryptic yet exceedingly confident pronouncements. 

“Don’t make a habit of it, boy. I have no desire to regularly psychoanalyze you or prescribe your course of action.” He releases Scott’s shoulder.

“In any case, we’re done. You can put on your glasses.” He brushes hair off the nape of Scott’s neck again. This time, it just feels like someone touching Scott’s neck, no more. No less. 

Instead of going for his glasses right away, Scott runs his fingers over the crown of his head, rubs the back, feels the bristly back-and-forth of his newly short hair with something like wonder. Erik had completed the haircut without him realizing it. 

On impulse, he stands and hugs him. The chair is still pinned awkwardly between them, and he’s sure that he’s shedding loose hairs on the soft sweater that he’s pressed his face against. Scott twitches at the embarrassed burn in his chest but breathes through it. Erik hugs him back anyway, squeezing tight for a single moment before letting him go. The last of Scott’s tears slip free. 

Scott wipes his eyes, slides his glasses back on. He feels like smiling all of a sudden, filled with the same quiet joy he’s known when he spies a trick shot after he’s spent an evening hustling pool. “Thanks, old man.” Barely in the pocket, but it’s enough. 

Erik snorts, understanding his intent easily. “It’ll be enough thanks for you to stop using that horrible two-in-one shampoo. And don’t try using kitchen scissors to cut your hair again.” Erik grabs them and stalks off, muttering something about disinfecting. 

Scott laughs. The sound startles himself. 

Alone, he goes again to the sink. The bathroom doesn’t seem quite as empty with the detritus of his haircut still scattered around it. He can imagine the entire Weapon X base filled with the mess of mundane life. Every day, more mutants appeared into the same hostile world. They’d need a place to rest. 

He looks in the mirror and examines his reflection. Notes the angles of his face, the soft swoop of his hair framing his brow. Would he pass the animal self-recognition test? He thinks he does look different with his hair trimmed after all. He can live with that. 

He sits with himself a moment more before slipping out. 

**Author's Note:**

> A few things some readers might have picked up on:  
> -Yes, this Scott is autistic.  
> -This fic’s Erik alludes to some of the tensions between him and Xavier I read in 2004 Excalibur and other mutant nation stories. As a refugee/arrivant, Erik relates to mutant nations in noticeably different ways than this Scott and Xavier do in their positions as unquestionably white settlers. But also Scott doesn’t pick up on that at all in this fic. One day I’ll figure out how to write something directly about race/gender/colonialism in Excalibur instead of skirting around it in my fics. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Catch me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/boo_cool_robot) or [Tumblr](https://soundingonlyatnightasyousleep.tumblr.com/), where I yell about imperialism in X-men and make jokes about Magneto.


End file.
